DJ History: Mark Farina

Imagine a down-tempo fusion of hip hop instrumentals, funk classics, acid jazz and some curveballs, all liberally soaked in lysergic acid diethylamide, and you’d be getting there. While the UK had the snappier (and now perhaps discredited) trip hop, in the US, ‘mushroom jazz’ became firstly a compilation series and latterly, a quasi-genre. Its architect was Mark Farina, a second-generation Chicago DJ who rose up in the wake of the house gold rush of the late 1980s, alongside peers like Derrick Carter, DJ Sneak, DJ Heather and Mark Picchiotti. Although Farina is at least as well known for his deep house sets, his reputation as a DJ par excellence was built on the Mushroom Jazz series, which this year marks its 20th anniversary (and eighth in the series). We caught up with the San Francisco-based DJ to ask him about his fungal funk mixes, the early industrial scene in Chi-town and the impact of EDM.

Tell us about the genesis of Mushroom Jazz...

It was 1989 and I’d just moved into an apartment with Derrick Carter, Chris Nazuka and G-Most. We were all working at Gramaphone [record store in Chicago] and I was really into the house scene at that time but also the early East Coast hip hop, the UK acid jazz sound, French hip hop like MC Solaar and some funk classics – especially stuff that was being sampled. I was playing at a Chicago club called the Shelter and they built a room on the side called the Paramount Room, where it was just big sofas and chairs with a bar: I got hired to play two nights a week.

When I went on New York record shopping expeditions, I’d check out clubs and I noticed there would be a room that was house and in the others there’d be hip hop or reggae. In Chicago all the rooms would just be house - so I made a concerted effort to try and play different stuff to the main room. So it wasn’t a dancefloor space, it was head-nod music.

All us DJs at Gramaphone sold mixtapes over the counter and they were all house, so I made a Mushroom Jazz mixtape that featured the music I played at the Paramount Room. They built up a little popularity among different people and became the cassette tape you’d put in the car driving to the club, or something you’d pop in the tape deck at an after-party at someone’s house.

Were you selling enough tapes to make some sort of a living from them? Bad Boy Bill was the mixtape king, right?

Yeah, I mean I wasn’t up to his status but it was definitely funding my vinyl-buying career at the time. You gotta remember, back then we wouldn’t make much money from DJ sets, so our goal at that time was to be like Bad Boy Bill: “I just wanna get on the radio!” We wanted to get our mixes on the radio, because that’s how he would sell so many tapes. Bill had a really nice car at the time; “What, you bought this car from making mixtapes?!”

What was your first experience of dance music?

I started going out at an early age, when I was in grade ten or eleven in high school. There was a place in Chicago called Medusa’s that was a juice bar on Sheffield and School. It was closely affiliated with WaxTrax! Records, a lot of their acts would play there and I was into industrial stuff like Ministry, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, Anne Clark, Section 25, Yello, New Order.

They were all influences on the original house sound...

Yeah. And being in Chicago at that time, mixing was very important – so even in that genre, everything was heavily beat-matched. At Medusa’s they had a Teen Dance and it was 6.30pm to 10.45pm on a Friday. This is where we got our clubbing legs. It was a really amazing place and definitely ahead of its time. We became regulars. They were very advanced so they would change the theme every month so you’d go in one month and you’d be inside and it would be like a New York gangway with clothes hanging from fire escapes, with stars on the ceiling to replicate the outside. You’d go in another time and there’d be a Sphinx and a big pyramid. One room filled with smoke, they’d just fog up so you couldn’t even see your hands and then play weird animal noises like AAAAIIEEERGHAAW!

I started out not being super into the house stuff, I came at it from the industrial side. Then I got into ‘Acid Tracks’ but one of the first of the crossover songs that became popular on that scene was Model 500’s ‘No UFOs’. I heard that and it blew my mind and I had to find out what it was. Pre-Shazam, it took a bit of searching.

When did you discover house music?

My first true house experience was Lil Louis, who started to do a Sunday night there, and it was like Whoah! Completely different! Me and my best friend Chris Nazuka, who was Japanese, were the only non-black people in this club, but we loved it. Louis would play a James Brown megamix and everybody danced together with their arms joined, almost in a circle and we were like: ‘What is this?’ It was like a different energy we’d never seen before. And Louis had these big guys either side of him with their arms crossed – I don’t know if they were his bouncers – but the whole image of it was crazy. As a 16-year-old I’d heard about house parties, the Power Plant and all this stuff, but being a suburban white kid I didn’t have access or the knowledge for any of that, so all of it was new.

What was the one instance or event that made you want to DJ?

I wanna say the first time I saw Technics 1200s. We were recording mixes but we hadn’t really seen mixing in action. There was a period where we knew mixes were happening but we hadn’t really seen how it happened. There was a club called McGreevy’s and unlike some of the clubs, there they had the DJ booth in the open. So we were like, ‘Oh, what is that slider on the turntable? Oh, it’s the pitch.’ We’d been using our finger to pretend mix. At Medusas one night I started chatting to Terry Martin, the resident DJ. I got let in the booth and started hanging out there. That ended my dancing career.

Did it make you want to work at Gramaphone?

I started DJing first, but I realised the way to get records was to work at a record store.

You went to college in Tucson, didn’t you?

I started DJing in Chicago but I went to school in Tucson in 1988 and I got a try-out at a club called Fineline. It doesn’t exist now, but certain clubs would have their own record collection in the club, so it was like their own library, and they had everything I had. I played from 8pm or 9pm until three in the morning. You get a lot of practice quickly if you’re playing two or three nights a week like that. I was getting $14 an hour back then and thought, ‘Oh shit, $14 for playing records?! This is amazing.’

How did you meet Derrick?

After I went to Tucson, I went to Columbia College, Chicago, and there was a little record store that I found near Columbia called Imports Etc and I’d go there in between classes. Derrick had some picks on the wall, I started gravitating towards his and we started chatting in the store. It turned out he was into New Order, Depeche Mode and a lot of other new wave stuff and not just regular house. We started hanging out from there.

And you ended up as roommates?

Yeah. It was late 1988 or ’89 and as we started hanging out we started doing some mixes together. Derrick was doing some on WNUR, the North Western University radio station. We started doing mixes at my house and we’d head straight over to the North Western University and put the mixes on. Eventually we got our first apartment away from our parents at Randolph and Halsted, which was what we called Red Nail. That was how we started hanging in the city.

Tell us about working at Gramaphone...

We moved into Red Nail in 1989 but before I worked there I just started hanging out all the time. I’d be there every day. Eventually a job came up. There was a circle of people who hung out there and eventually a slot would come up, almost like a substitute at a football match: OK, you’re in! I was really happy to get a job there. It was a great community: Derrick, Sneak, Ralphi Rosario, DJ Heather, Psychobitch, Miles Maeda.

How has EDM changed things in the States?

Music comes and goes real fast now, and in DJ sets there’s all this quick stuff going on. I miss being able to pace yourself. You gotta take your time and build it up. I’m not dissing EDM on all levels, because it’s bringing new people into dance music which is good. But sometimes when everything is packed into one-hour sets, expression is very limited. I don’t like a lot of frequent drops-and-buildups, drops-and-buildups – I mean I like them, but spread over the course of three hours! There’s nothing wrong with bringing the energy of a room down a little, to allow everyone to catch their breath. But the EDM scene has brought back access for kids to hear electronica, even though it’s stuff I don’t necessarily like. There are a lot of genres in EDM that are questionable, but there are at least places where kids can go and see DJs play. Festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival have moved away from house, unfortunately. They’ll have a small stage with me and Doc Martin playing, but if I can turn on some kids to some proper house music, then it’s a win.

‘Mushroom Jazz 8’ is out now